Like so many institutions, UC Irvine frequently fails to tell taxpayers in plain English what's happening on campus even though the public covers most of its $1.5 billion budget. The school uses jargon, confusing titles and pointless acronyms when it comes to things like MF3, a new engineering center.

It's infuriating and it's sadly ironic. I've heard professors moan that the public isn't very literate when it comes to science. Studies do show that less than 30 percent of adults grasp basic scientific terms and concepts. Yet UCI contributes to the problem by talking gibberish.

Irvine's School of Engineering is among the worst offenders. It just established the Micro/Nano Fluidics Fundamentals Focus Center, or MF3. In a news release, the campus says this involves "the science and technology of preparing and handling small amounts of fluids on microchips."

Fine. Call it the Center for Microchips. UCI has a Center for Hearing Research and a Center for Immunology. Those are understandable names. MF3 is not. And people are already confused by Calit2, the name the engineering school uses for the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Calit2's Web site - its electronic front door - greets visitors with empty jargon, saying things like the institute "represents a new mechanism to address large-scale societal issues by bringing together multidisciplinary teams of the best minds …

"And these disciplinary areas are creating a spiral vortex, interpenetrating and changing each other as they themselves change."

New mechanism? Interpenetrating? Spiral vortex?

We just want to know if Calit2 will improve our cell phones and make our computers work faster. And we don't want hype, which is what we get. The institute does not represent a new idea. Schools like MIT and Johns Hopkins University have long had professors from different fields collaborate with industry on high-tech projects, which is basically what Calit2 does.

Engineering isn't alone in confusing the public. UCI's public calendar has recently listed lectures with titles like "Managing African Portugal - EU Accession & the Dissolution of Lusotropicalism" and "Automatic Structure Discovery: Factoring for the 21st Century." There also was a listing for "Mechanisms of Vocal Plasticity in the Songbird," which sounds like they're talking about how songbirds sing.

This is the sort of double talk you expect from NASA, which has few rivals in jargon. The space agency recently launched THEMIS, a cluster of satellites that will explore Earth's magnificent northern lights. THEMIS stands for "Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms."

Good grief.

Over the years, I've asked many scholars why the science community doesn't speak in plain English. Basically, they say that arcane language is part of their culture and that they work on many things that are difficult to describe. That's an excuse, it's offensive and it's inaccurate.

Few people struggled to understand the late astronomer Carl Sagan. People also found it comparatively easy to follow the public lectures of the late Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. Both scientists were adored by the public.

When a scholar or institution gives you jargon, they're being elitist and lazy and disrespectful to the people who pay for most of their work. Namely, the public.

WHY, ROBOTS? We recently ran a story in which readers told us what they would include in an underwater city. Now, we'd like you to answer these questions for an upcoming story: If you could conjure up a powerful personal robot, what abilities would you give it? And how would you use it?

We're asking because robots are becoming so ubiquitous, a trend that will only continue. A passive robot in Arkansas is trying to capture footage of the rare ivory-billed woodpecker, which was once thought to be extinct. Scientists in Colorado are working on robotic cars. And MIT is working on "social" robots that would be particularly useful to the elderly and disabled. So the subject's on our mind.

E-mail your thoughts to grobbins@ocregister.com. Your ideas must conform to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which are:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

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